Being too harsh on yourself

Question: If you’re too harsh on yourself, self-judgment, judge too much, do you have to release self-judgment in order to go forward?

This answer was given by Kim Michaels at a conference in Holland.

Kim: I think we’re all too hard on ourselves because we’re brought up to be. Look at the image of God we’ve all grown up with, namely that God is the angry judge in the sky and, if you make a mistake, you’re going to be sent to hell forever. You’re going to be punished by eternal suffering.

A lot of people have been brought up with that image. Even if we haven’t, there is a certain collective consciousness that makes us judge ourselves very harshly when we make mistakes. When I was new on the spiritual path and even when I had found the ascended master teachings, it was sort of an extension of this. The masters were like the angry God in the sky. They weren’t angry, but they were still judgmental. You had to be perfect. You had to do the outer things just right, and there was a lot of focus in one organization I was in on doing all the outer things: wearing the right kind of clothes, not driving a red car, all of these outer things.

I have come to realize that the real challenge on the spiritual path is to accept that you are an extension of God. How do you accept that? You accept that by realizing that God loves you unconditionally. What the world tells us is that there may be a God and he may love you if you live up to certain conditions. That’s a very vicious, very aggressive energy in the world that wants you to believe this. This, of course, ties in with the theme of the conference of anti-love, because they absolutely want you to believe you have to live up to some kind of condition.

That’s why I think we judge ourselves – because we think if we are not perfect or if we don’t live up to these conditions, God is not going to love us, or whatever it is we imagine. I think the greatest challenge on the spiritual path is to actually accept unconditional love. I experienced it one time, as I’ve written about. I had an experience where I experienced God’s presence, and it still took me probably three years to process and integrate that experience. Finally one day it was like it clicked in me because the thought came to me: If God’s love is unconditional, what condition do I need to fulfill in order to be worthy of it? The answer is obvious - there can’t be any conditions you have to fulfill in order to receive unconditional love.

There is one condition: You have to receive it. You have to accept it. And so you have to look at yourself: “What is the belief I have that prevents me from accepting what God is offering me freely at any moment?” I think, until we see that consciously and see the lie, see the fallacy of it, we’re not free of it. We’re still chasing this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and the rainbow just keeps moving ahead of us. We’re never going to reach it until we realize that it’s futile to even try.